The first advice I would give is recognize that this is not a practical conversation, right?

Like when a door comes off your airplane, what people don't want to know is how many other airplanes are safe and that what they want to know, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and the best-selling

author of The Power of Habit. His new book is called Supercommunicators, how to unlock the secret language of

connection. I caught up with Doohig for a conversation about what you can do to be a

super communicator. Doohig's experience covering Microsoft right when Sam Altman was ousted from Open AI, and why

great investors know how to handle a little disagreement. I want to talk about your book in detail but up front the thesis of this idea of

super communication really to me comes down to stop talking start. Is there a question that you've been asked

recently that you're still mulling over and thinking about right now? Oh that's

such a good question. It might be this question that you just asked me. Well let me talk a little bit about

like why questions work, like because some questions are more powerful than others and then I think that

will lead into the types of questions that when I hear them they really excite me.

So one of the things that we know about super communicators, and these are people who can consistently

kind of connect with anyone, right? They're the people who everyone wants to call when they're feeling down or when they need advice or or turn to for leadership.

And it's because they're so good at listening to other people and making themselves heard.

And one of the things that we know about them is that they tend to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person.

And some of those questions are kind of throwaway questions, like, what do you think about that or what happened next that invite you into the conversation

But some of them are what are known as deep questions which ask about someone's beliefs or values or experiences and and asking these deep questions is really important like if you meet

someone who's a lawyer if you say you know why do you decide to go to law school or what do you

love about your job those are deep questions They invite us to explain who we are.

And when we ask those deep questions, other people feel closer to us and they

become more likely to listen to us in return.

And so I think the questions that I've been asked that are most powerful are all variations

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